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“He Came to Earth that Winter Night” A Hymn for Christmas

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The Miracle of Christmas
C.M.

He came to earth that winter night
to share our human frame.
A choir of angels took to flight
to glorify his name.

Some shepherds in a field nearby
were summoned to his birth,
And heard the angels raise the cry
of peace upon the earth.

They went to where the babe did lay,
and found a manger bare.
Some sheep and oxen in the hay,
and Mary, Joseph, there.

O mysteries no eye has seen,
no human ear has heard,
That God should come to such a scene,
and we should call him Lord.

The world’s vast empires rise and fall,
great Caesar lost his claim,
But Mary’s babe is all in all,
and Jesus is his name.

© 2001 Richard L. Floyd

Suggested tune: “Winchester Old”

(Photo:  “Adoration of the Shepherds” by Gerard van Honthorst)

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Garrison Keillor on “The Season of Letter-Perfect Families”

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A year ago the first draft of my annual family Christmas letter that I sent out to my kids for vetting was so grumpy that they all quickly answered my e-mail and suggested that not everybody getting the letter might be able to appreciate my dry and sardonic (and apparently melancholic) wit.  The final result was much more presentable, but I felt regret that some measure of truthfulness was sacrificed in the process

The whole genre of Christmas newsletters is shot through with pitfalls. I found this great little piece by Garrison Keillor in Caroline Kennedy’s delightful anthology A Family Christmas.  My only disagreement with the following is his assertion of the universal modesty of Minnesotans.  After all, Prince is from the Twin Cities, but perhaps he is the exception that proves the rule.  In any case  I think Keillor has done as good a job as anybody in capturing the perils of the annual family letter:

“I love reading Christmas newsletters in which the writer bursts the bounds of modesty and comes forth with one gilt-edge paragraph after another: ‘Tara was top scorer on the Lady Cougars soccer team and won the lead role in the college production of Antigone, which by the way they are performing in the original Greek. Her essay on chaos theory as an investment strategy will be in the next issue of Forbes magazine, the same week she will appear as a model in Vogue. How she does what she does and still makes Phi Beta Kappa is a wonderment to us all. And, yes, she is still volunteering at the homeless shelter.’

I get a couple dozen Christmas letters a year, and I sit and read them in my old bathrobe as I chow down Hostess Twinkies. Everyone in the letters is busy as beavers, piling up honors hand over fist, volunteering up a storm, traveling to Beijing, Abu Dhabi and Antarctica; nobody is in treatment or depressed or flunking out of school, though occasionally there is a child who gets shorter shrift. ‘Chad is adjusting well to his new school and making friends. He especially enjoys handicrafts.’ How sad for Chad. There he is in reform school learning to get along with other little felons and making belts and birdhouses, but he can’t possibly measure up to the goddess Tara. Or Lindsey or Meghan or Madison, each of whom is stupendous.

This is rough on us whose children are not paragons. Most children aren’t. A great many teenage children go through periods when they loath you and go around slamming doors and playing psychotic music and saying things like ‘I wish I had never been born,’ which is a red-hot needle stuck under your fingernail. One must be very selective, writing about them for the annual newsletter. ‘Sean is becoming very much his own person and is unafraid to express himself. He is a lively presence in our family and his love of music is a thing to behold.’

I come from Minnesota where it is considered shameful to be shameless, where modesty is always in fashion, where self-promotion is looked at askance. Give us a gold trophy and we will have it bronzed so you won’t think that we think we’re special. There are no Donald Trumps in Minnesota. We strangle them all in their cribs. A football player who does a special dance after scoring a touchdown is something of a freak.

The basis of modesty is winter. When it is ten below zero and the wind is whipping across the tundra, there is no such thing as stylish and smart, and everybody’s nose runs. And the irony is, if you’re smart and stylish, nobody will tell you about your nose. You look in the rearview mirror and you see a gob of green snot hanging from your left nostril and you wonder, ‘How long have I been walking around like that? Is that why all those people were smiling at me?’

Yes it is.

So we don’t toot our own horns. We can be rather ostentatious in our modesty and can deprecate faster than you can compliment us. We are averse to flattery. We just try to focus on keeping our noses clean.

So here is my Christmas letter:

Dear friends. We are getting older but are in pretty good shape and moving forward insofar as we can tell. We still drink strong coffee and read the paper and drive the same old cars. We plan to go to Norway next summer. We think this war is an unmitigated disaster that will end up costing a trillion dollars and we worry for our country. Our child enjoys her new school and is making friends. She was a horsie in the church Christmas pageant and hunkered down beside the manger and seemed to be singing when she was supposed to. We go on working and hope to be adequate to the challenges of the coming year but are by no means confident. It’s winter. God is around here somewhere but does not appear to be guiding our government at the moment. Nonetheless we persist. We see kindness all around us and bravery and we are cheered by the good humor of young people. The crabapple tree over the driveway is bare, but we have a memory of pink blossoms and expect them to return. God bless you all.”

(Garrison Keillor, “The Old Scout: The Season of Letter Perfect Families,” December 12, 2006, in A Family Christmas selected and introduced by Caroline Kennedy, Hyperion, 2007)

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“Why Mary?” C. S. Lewis on the Scandal of Particularity

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One of the curious features of the Christian faith is what theologians call “the scandal of particularity.”  Rather than put forth a general philosophy of religious truth or a set of axioms the Christian faith tells a story, and that story invites questions: Why the election of the people of Israel to carry the promise?  Why is Mary chosen to bear Jesus?  Why Jesus himself as the incarnate One?

C. S. Lewis tells us that God’s peculiar way of choosing particular people for his purposes is an offense to our modern sensibilities.

 “To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.” (From Miracles, Chapter 14)

(Picture:  Da Vinci, sketch of a woman’s head)
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Jesus had a Mother

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The simplest fact of the Christmas story is that Jesus had a mother. Mary is the guarantee of the true humanity of Jesus Christ. That Jesus had a mother indicates that he doesn’t merely resemble us; he is the same as us.

In the Creed Jesus’ human life is bracketed by two people: “He was born of the Virgin Mary, and he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

“Born of the Virgin Mary.” Jesus begins his life, as we all do, with his mother. I was born in the former Women’s Hospital in New York City, now part of the great St Luke’s complex. The tired Floyd family joke was that as a male I came to be born in a women’s hospital, “because I wanted to be with my mother.”

But if in his human nature he is just the same as us, he is at the same time truly divine, and this is where the paradox of the virgin birth helps communicate the mystery of the incarnation. Mary herself carries some of the paradoxes of the story. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan calls her “Our Lady of the Paradoxes: Virgin but Mother, Human Mother but Mother of God.”

The title for Mary, “Mother of God,” comes from the story of the Visitation in Luke, which many Christians will be hearing this week in the Gospel lesson for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It is her cousin Elizabeth who is the first person to recognize Mary’s unique role in the drama of salvation. She says, “Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

As the Mother of God, or the “God bearer,” as the Eastern Orthodox put it, Mary is instrumental to the story. An ordinary humble young women who find herself in an extraordinary situation, Mary, like John the Baptist, points beyond herself to Christ. Since her role is to insure the humanity of Jesus, all attempts to turn her into something more than a human mother undermine her proper place in the story. It is helpful to keep in mind St. Ambrose’s dictum, that “Mary was the temple of God, not the God of the Temple.”

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Crash helmets and life jackets in church? So suggests Annie Dillard

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A week ago I posted one of my favorite quotes from Annie Dillard.  My friend and former Baptist colleague (former colleague, not former Baptist) Ashley Smith commented (on my Facebook Page): “Dillard is one of my favorites as well; I’ve read Holy the Firm over and over, and used these quotes more than once in preaching and writing.”

I wrote her back: “Ashley, her (Dillard’s) words maintain their freshness, don’t they? The other perennial quote from her, which I can’t seem to find, is about how people should be wearing crash helmets during church services because of the danger of the holy.”

And she found it.  Thanks Ashley!

It’s from the essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in Dillard’s volume Teaching a Stone to Talk:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk. Harper and Row, 1982)

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An Appreciation: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth

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Thomas Merton and Karl Barth died on this day in 1968, Barth in Basel at the age of 82, and Merton in Bangok, Thailand at the age of 53. They couldn’t have been more different, but they both were powerful influences on me.

I was a sophomore in college when they died, and I doubt that I had ever heard of either one of them. It must have been a year or two later, during a time of great personal soul-searching, that I first read Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. It was at the height of the Vietnam war, and I had recently resigned from Air Force ROTC, left college to work in New York, and was applying for Conscientious Objector status.

I was also seeking authentic voices about God, and Merton, along with others such as Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, and Daniel Berrigan, spoke powerfully to me.

William James speaks about the natural mysticism of adolescence, and I suppose I was no different. I didn’t just want to read about God, I wanted to know God.  Merton’s popular autobiography The Seven Story Mountain portrays a troubled young man who finds peace with God through contemplation and ends up happy in a Trappist monastery.

There was a deep romantic mysticism in Merton’s writing that resonated with my own search for God. Much like poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, another convert to Roman Catholicism, Merton sensed God all around him in the natural world. I wouldn’t have known it then, but reading this passage from Merton today I hear echoes of Hopkins (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”):

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.”

I discovered Karl Barth several years later, not in seminary as one might expect, but in my first pastorate. The challenge then was not to know God, but to figure out what this God might want to have me say to his people from week to week.  I didn’t dive right into the monumental Church Dogmatics, but started with smaller works, the wonderful Word of God and Word of Man,  and Evangelical Theology: An Introduction.

If Merton, the Catholic, found God in contemplation and in nature, Barth, the Protestant, found him elsewhere.  Barth’s God was the wholly Other, who breaks into our world through the revelation in Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture.  There was no natural theology here, and Barth saw religion itself as a false alternative to faith. He said, “Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is Himself the way.

I had a group of young pietists in my first church, and it was Barth who gave me the language of Christian faith with which to speak with them.

I rarely read Merton anymore, but I owe him a debt for writing words that brought me closer to God at a critical time in my pilgrimage. I still read Karl Barth all the time and find new delights each time.  Both deserved to be remembered by the church on this day.

(Jim Gordon wrote a thoughtful response to this post on his blog Living Wittily. I commend it to you. Find it here.)

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“On the Death of Karl Barth” by Jack Clemo

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December 10, 1968 was a day of loss for the church of Jesus Christ, as two of her intellectual giants, Karl Barth and Thomas Merton, died within hours of each other.

On this eve of the forty-first anniversary of their deaths I offer this poem by the late British writer and poet Jack Clemo (1916-1994). Clemo, who was from Cornwall, became deaf as a young man and blind around the age of forty. His poem is entitled:

 “On the Death of Karl Barth”

He ascended from a lonely crag in winter,
His thunder fading in the Alpine dusk;
And a blizzard was back on the Church,
A convenient cloak, sprinkling harlot and husk—
Back again, after all his labour
To clear the passes, give us access
Once more to the old prophetic tongues,
Peak-heats in which man, time, progress
Are lost in reconciliation
With outcast and angered Deity.

He has not gone silenced in defeat;
The suffocating swirl of heresy
Confirms the law he taught us; we keep the glow,
Knowing the season, the rhythm, the consummation.
Truth predicts the eclipse of truth,
And in that eclipse it condemns man,
Whose self-love with its useful schools of thought,
Its pious camouflage of a God within,
Is always the cause of the shadow, the fall, the burial,
The smug rub of hands
Amid a reek of research.

The cyclic, well-meant smothering
Of the accursed footprints inside man’s frontier;
The militant revival,
Within time and as an unchanged creed,
Of the eternal form and substance of the Word:
This has marked Western history,
Its life’s chief need and counter need,
From the hour God’s feet shook Jordan.

We touched His crag of paradox
Through our tempestuous leader, now dead,
Who plowed from Safenwil to show us greatness
In a God lonely, exiled, homeless in our sphere,
Since his footfall breeds guilt, stirs dread
Of a love fire-tongued, cleaving our sin,
Retrieving the soul from racial evolution,
Giving it grace to mortify,
In deeps or shallow, all projections of the divine.

(From The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, Edited by Donald Davie, 1988, p 290-291)

(Portrait of Jack Clemo by Betty Penver)
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“Described with such grace:” the writing of Annie Dillard

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Another of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard, whose wonderful  Tinker at Pilgrim Creek earned her the Pulitzer Prize at age 27. That book features vivid descriptions of a closely-watched natural world, the kind of thing Gerard Manley Hopkins might have written had he been an essayist.

Like Hopkins, Dillard became a convert to Roman Catholicism, a move she once admitted in a interview had an inevitability about it.  She has a rare appreciation for the mysteries that surround us every day, and the gift of words to bring them alive on the page.

In a later book, Holy the Firm, she demonstrates that she also observes the inside world of the human soul as well as the outside world of Tinker Creek. Here is an excerpt:

“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery.

A blur of romance clings to our notions of “publicans,” “sinners,” “the poor,” “the people in the marketplace,” “our neighbors,” as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is none but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved. So. You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church.” (Holy the Firm, Harper and Row, 1977)

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Rick’s Braised Beef Short Ribs

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We got our first blanket of snow the other day here in the Berkshires, so it was time to make some comfort food. Cold weather always gets me thinking about stews and braises, and one of my favorites is beef short ribs, which are the ends cut off the prime rib. They’re relatively cheap to buy and really easy to make. I don’t have the recipe my mother used to make them with, but I know it involved painting them with ketchup, and it may have had dried onion soup mix (remember that?) in the braising liquid. Whatever was in them they were a treat.

Here’s my version:

3 lbs meaty beef short ribs
2 tbs olive oil
1 good-sized yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 carrot, coarsely chopped
1 stalk of celery, coarsely chopped
¼ tsp dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1 cup beef stock
½ cup hearty dry red wine
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degree F. Salt and pepper the ribs.  In a Dutch oven or oven-proof pot with a cover heat the oil over medium high heat and brown the meat on all sides, being careful not to burn it. Do this in batches and don’t overcrowd the pot. Also, dry the ribs with paper towels so they will brown properly.

When they are nice and brown, remove the ribs to a plate, turn down the heat to medium and add the chopped vegetables, stirring until they take on some color.

Add the stock and wine and bring to a boil, stirring to get any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Add the thyme and bay leaves and return the ribs to the pot. Cover the pot and put it in the oven for two hours. The meat should be tender and almost falling off the bone. Remove the ribs to a plate and cover with foil to keep warm. Put the pot back on the top of the stove, and reduce liquid over medium high heat until it thickens a little bit to a syrupy consistency (you may not need to do this.)

I like to put a rib on each plate over mashed potatoes with a few spoonfuls of the rich braising liquid, but this is nice to over polenta or rice.  Some green beans (or a salad) and some crusty bread and you have a simple and comforting meal.

For a wine pairing I suggest any hearty dry red. This is humble dish and needs a sturdy humble wine. I served our current Italian house red with this, MasciarelliMotepulciano d’Abruzzu, which is also the wine in the braising liquid. Enjoy.

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“The Relevance of Analog Philosophies in a Digital Age”

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One of my regular ruminations is about how new communications technologies help shape us. Another one is how the middle has fallen out of so much of our discourse in society, as shown by the new levels of partisanship in politics and the rise of popular wing nuts on both the left and the right. And certainly we witness this in the church, where one is either considered a liberal or a fundamentalist. So I was intrigued when I received this post from my old college friend Bill Graff from his home in Taipei, where he suggests that the binary nature of our new communication technologies may be exacerbating the trend toward the extremes:

“When you and I were kids/young adults, our parents always accused us of being too impatient. If you recall, oodles of printer’s ink were given to the first ‘television generation,’ and what seemed to ‘old farts’ the desire of their children to have the world fixed in the same time frame as a sitcom, about 30 minutes.

Now, however, technology has provided for something even quicker and faster than the old-fashioned ‘glass teat:’ instant digital communications (and it’s logical outcome, social networking). I have nothing but praise for the minds who created this artificial nervous system.

But one (of many) of the unintended consequences seems to be the loss of ‘middle ground.’ Digital systems know ‘1’ or ‘0,’ true or false, black or white, saturation and cutoff, and can evaluate multiple functions and terms in fractional microseconds.

Analog systems tend to create a lot of ‘well maybe. . .’ which is incompatible with expectations of many contemporary young folks. This tendency to react rather than think shall create many new challenges. It will continue to be important to keep ‘the middle’ (moderating, middle class, middle earth, middlefish pond, etc.)” (William Graff, personal post)

Something to think about.